Novels in Three Lines + Twitter [STREAM]

August 11, 2008 →
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Novels in Three Lines + Twitter

Félix Fénéon:

Scratching himself with a revolver with an overly sensitive trigger, M. Édouard B. removed the tip of his nose in the Vivienne precinct house.

Bonnaut, a locksmith in Montreuil, was chatting on his doorstep when the gangster called Shoe Face struck him twice with a knife.

Novels in Three Lines is a collection of more than a thousand anonymously-published blurbs that appeared in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. They were all penned by Félix Fénéon who worked as a clerk in the French War Department. Luc Sante, the translator, describes Félix and his “novels”:

They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage [...] They depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.

My friend Kio and I thought it was a perfect narrative to bring to Twitter. She talked to a friend at NYRB (the publisher) and got permission to reprint the text in serial form over Twitter. NYRB are quite excited about it.

You can follow Novels in Three Lines on Twitter at ‘novelsin3lines‘. I suggest tracking it directly using your phone for best results. We’ve agreed to do two updates per day: once at 9am (EST) in the morning like a newspaper and once at 9pm (EST) at night to give you something to smile/talk about with your friends when you’re about town.